I hope to win a very, very sweet graphics card from NVidia, because my MacBook Pro just isn’t cutting it anymore for 3D work. Producing this piece was maddening. I’ll be buying a PC as soon as I land in Vancouver in 6 months.

Check out the full entry here.

Paris, 2042. Buildings in the background.

This took a while to make.

Made in Maya, rendered in Mental Ray.

You can also check it out full size (Warning! 2560×1600, 1.7MB).

Kudos to them.

Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, is the single greatest influence on my art. Born in Paris in 1938, he is in my opinion, by far the greatest illustrator to have lived. Moebius doesn’t have a particular style; rather, he has thousands of styles, often unique to the project he is working on. One of the founders and lead contributors to the seminal 1970′s comic magazine, Metal Hurlant (better known on this side of the Atlantic as Heavy Metal Magazine), his career has been as prolific as it has far reaching and influential.

You may know him indirectly from his contributions as storyboard artist for movies such as Alien, Abyss, 5th Element, Tron or countless others. His short comic with Dan O’Bannon, The Long Tomorrow, influenced the phenomenal movie Blade Runner as well as the writings of William Gibson, my favorite science fiction author.

I’ve learned so much from seeing and absorbing Moebius’ works. I’ve focused on drawing speed and line quality. I’ve learned to embrace the surreal and non-clich� in my own work, I’ve learned to adopt countless styles of drawing and creating, I’ve learned to play with narrative flow and just make stuff up as I go along. But my own work pales in comparison to the master.

I’ve long since stopped reading comics, and long since stopped drawing, yet the Moebius influence pervades my work even to this day. He was my last, and single greatest, influence in drawing.

There is precious little of his work on the web, and I don’t have a scanner, so alas I can’t provide many good examples of what he is capable of. Suffice to say I have at least 12 of his graphic novels, my favorite being his and Stan Lee’s epic Silver Surfer: Parable.

A thing of beauty, Silver Surfer is graceful, angelic and renaissance-inspired. Galactus is a massive false god who attempts to destroy human civilization. Page after page of jaw-dropping futuristic cityscapes, glass citadels and epic battles for earth’s fate.

Jean Giraud is a fountain of creativity. He is unto drawing, what Michelangelo is unto marble sculpture: pure genius. Horror, eroticism, fantasy, sci-fi, gorgeous desert landscapes, surrealism… he does it all, and better than I’ve seen it done before or since.

A documentary about Moebius is posted online at drawn.ca.

To see how strong an influence he was on my teenage mind, check out the old drawings at the bottom of my portfolio page.

The middle piece was horrifying! But in a good way! It was by a female Russian composer who Vadim worked closely with many years prior. I’ve never taken a liking to Shostakovich, who always seems to fall short of the mark for me. It’s just not extreme enough for me.

Sofia Gubaidulina’s masterpiece Offertorium was compelling, anxious, and terrifying, like the soundtrack to a Hitchcock thriller. Not everyone there loved it (most people prefer beauty to horror; I like both), but I was riveted. Astounded. Sofia has more balls than any male composer I’ve ever heard. It was the most maculine, unyeilding, strong piece I’ve yet heard in a classical music setting.

Awesome!

I’ve added a 3D portfolio page, mostly as a sort of online resum√? while seeking employment with non-local companies. It also has some old drawings from highschool(!) and some prints from art school. Many employers want to see drawing skills, and while I don’t really draw any more, I definitely could at one time.

It turns out employers want to see wireframes, clean edge loops and textures, too, so forgive the abundance of those things.

I have a couple of projects on the go and will update the page as often as I can. A lot of the 3D on that page is kinda old now.

High Bandwidth version (40MB, Quicktime): Mirror01 | Mirror02 | Mirror03

I’ve graduated the 3D animation program at BCIT, and Industry Night has come and gone. Massive thanks go to Christian Vondruska, who had my back while I was experiencing bizarre technical issues at Industry Night! I owe that guy several beers. Anyway, my reel is not truly ‘finished’ (are they ever, really?), but it’s about as close as it’s going to get for now.
It also uses pretty much everything I’ve learned… modeling, texturing, lighting, rigging, weighting, particles, fluid effects, soft body dynamics, etc etc. It’s got it all, in one short film!

I hope you like it! I’m kinda sick of looking at it, to be honest, but then, I’ve been working on it for four months…

I’ve seperated these screenshots from the movie page as they seem to fight with eachother in web browsers.

Many people have expressed interest in how my 3D work is progressing. I’ve got just over a month of classes left, and just over two months until Industry Night – when my classmates and I unleash our skills upon the world, and in particular, potential employers. I’m pretty excited.

Part one of my demo reel is just about finished. I’m modeling the final character, and am well underway with rendering out my final movie sequences.

Here’s some random clips and screenshots of part one – tentatively titled The Floating Islands. Yes, the little boy bears some resemblance to me as a kid ;)

You can get Democracy, and ‘Internet TV platform’ for Mac, Linux and Windows. It’s free and open source; give it a try!

Edit: As a cool aside, it uses hooks into your computer platform’s native media players to play the video; on Mac, click a playing video to switch to fullscreen Quicktime playback. Neat!